Wireless communication networks, such as mobile wireless telephone networks, have become increasingly prevalent over the past decade. These wireless communications networks are commonly referred to as “cellular networks”, because the network infrastructure is arranged to divide the service area into a plurality of regions called “cells”. A terrestrial cellular network includes a plurality of interconnected base stations, or base nodes, that are distributed geographically at designated locations throughout the service area. Each base node includes one or more transceivers that are capable of transmitting and receiving electromagnetic signals, such as radio frequency (RF) communications signals, to and from mobile user nodes, such as wireless telephones, located within the coverage area. The communications signals include, for example, voice data that has been modulated according to a desired modulation technique and transmitted as data packets. As can be appreciated by one skilled in the art, network nodes transmit and receive data packet communications in a multiplexed format, such as time-division multiple access (TDMA) format, code-division multiple access (CDMA) format, or frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) format, which enables a single transceiver at a first node to communicate simultaneously with several other nodes in its coverage area.
In recent years, a type of mobile communications network known as an “ad-hoc” network has been developed. In this type of network, each mobile node is capable of operating as a base station or router for the other mobile nodes, thus eliminating the need for a fixed infrastructure of base stations.
More sophisticated ad-hoc networks are also being developed which, in addition to enabling mobile nodes to communicate with each other as in a conventional ad-hoc network, further enable the mobile nodes to access a fixed network and thus communicate with other mobile nodes, such as those on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and on other networks such as the Internet. Details of these advanced types of ad-hoc networks are described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,072,650 entitled “Ad Hoc Peer-to-Peer Mobile Radio Access System Interfaced to the PSTN and Cellular Networks”, filed on Jun. 29, 2001, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,807,165 entitled “Time Division Protocol for an Ad-Hoc, Peer-to-Peer Radio Network Having Coordinating Channel Access to Shared Parallel Data Channels with Separate Reservation Channel”, and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,873,839 entitled “Prioritized-Routing for an Ad-Hoc, Peer-to-Peer, Mobile Radio Access System”, the entire content of each being incorporated herein by reference.
As can be appreciated by one skilled in the art, channels being used by nodes during transmission can change from time to time. Channel coherence time (Tc), in this regard, is a measure of how long a channel being used by a particular node remains unchanged. Tc depends on both the carrier frequency and vehicle speed. In particular, Tc=1/Bd, where Bd is Doppler spread. Doppler spread, in this regard, depends on the carrier frequency, vehicle speed, and the radio channel. Moreover, channel coherence time can be defined as the time difference at which the magnitude or envelope correlation coefficient between two signals at the same frequency falls below 0.5.
The channel coherence time is important in throughput optimization as systems can be designed to be mobile or stationary. Stationary systems, in this regard, do not have to transmit information for use in channel equalization as often as do highly mobile systems. For example, systems complaint with the IEEE Standard 802.11a (e.g., version IEEE Std. 802.11a-1999 (R2003)) and systems operating in accordance with variations of this standard, transmit training symbols at the start of a transmission and, after that, insert only pilots for each data symbol. This approach is spectrally efficient but limits mobility of the transmitting devices. On the other hand, if training symbols are transmitted more often, then the total throughput is lower than necessary when the transmitting devices are stationary.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.